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If you order a colonist to melee attack to death a downed target, they should quickly and efficiently slice their target's throat or snap their neck or something.

After an elephant manhunting pack I sent a guy to finish off the downed elephants, so he took an hour to shank the elephants repeatedly in random body parts until they died of blood loss. Either pawns can't even aim for the neck of an incapacitated target (frankly not surprising), or they enjoy torturing animals and raiders. Psychopaths might find it fun to bleed their victims out slowly, but normal colonists should just kill cleanly.

If people still want to keep the current behaviour, say, maybe you want to beat up a prisoner to train melee/doctoring skills, then you could split it into two orders: melee attack, and melee to death.

There's a notification when a pirate ship has a slave who is a colonist's family member, but the message is missing.

So among my first three colonists is a 63 year old bodyguard named Banana (named him after a friend). Banana is the resident animal lover and grower, peacefully tending to his corn fields and pet hares all day.

One of the first new colonists to join was Rennie, a nudist, volatile, psychopathic sheriff, which is an utterly terrifying combination of traits. Most of her jobs are disabled, so she made herself useful initially by hunting every wild animal in sight. She may have accidentally shot off the leg of Banana's pet hare, Jasmine, in her enthusiasm for killing squirrels.

After that little incident I decided Rennie should not be trusted with a gun. She had an interest in art so I set her up to make statues full time, hoping that artistic expression would placate her volatile nature. She's actually pretty good, she made a few shoddy statues at first but soon she was regularly cranking out excellent statues.

She must have had some narcissistic tendencies because she made several statues of herself that were quite terrifying:



But for some reason, her absolute favourite subject was Banana. At least five statues depicted him, including both grand statues she made before I switched to small statues for efficiency. Even I have to admit this is pretty adorable:



(I forgot to take a screenshot of the other grand statue, but it was a similarly adorable depiction of him training a labrador retriever.)

Later, a scientist named Meza joined the colony, she and Banana soon became lovers. Meza alternately works on art and research, so far she has made one statue of Banana, and... uhh, I have to say this gives me a completely different perspective on what she sees in him:



Anyways, rather sadly and suddenly, half of my colony came down with malaria. Banana and Meza were spared but Rennie was not so fortunate, and then everyone who had malaria ended up dying. After all the burials, Banana and Meza got engaged. I don't know if the game is more likely to trigger marriages in times of duress for dramatic effect, but I've noticed this trend in several colonist. After the malaria outbreak I was too sad to keep playing this colony, so I switched into ship-building mode. Now I'm in the process of strip mining the map and uninstalling all the statues to sell so I can get enough plasteel.

Out of curiosity I loaded an autosave where Rennie was still alive and checked her relationships. Her opinion of Banana was 0, no nice chat, no deep talk, nothing, even though Banana was frequently in and out of the hospital during the outbreak to build vitals monitors.. Banana's opinion of her was -25 because she was disfigured. It seems like they never had any social interaction with each other, but I imagine that Rennie secretly admired him from afar, which is why she made so many statues of him. She understood his gentle, bunny-loving nature better than Meza ever did, but she couldn't confess her unrequited love even as she laid dying wearing nothing but a squirrelskin cowboy hat.

tl;dr: Rimworld is the best soap opera I've ever seen.